Allen Ginsberg

Online Exhibition

July 22 - September 19, 2020

Curated by Thomas Solomon

Thomas Solomon Art Advisory is pleased to announce an online exhibition of Allen Ginsberg’s iconic black and white photographs from four distinct decades, the 1950s – 1980s. The online exhibition will be held virtually from July 21st – September 5th, 2020.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was best known as an American poet, mystic, counter-culture icon, and spokesman for the Beat Generation. His relationships with fellow writers, poets, lovers, and artist friends are documented throughout this exhibition of 37 photographs. The photographs capture silent and intimate moments of Ginsberg’s personal life and display a haunting diaristic inside-look to the Beat Generation. This important period documents America’s coming of age, creating a new bohemia of vivid, rebellious, political, and socially-minded artists. A number of these photographs were presented at Allen Ginsberg’s first one-person gallery exhibition titled Hideous Human Angels, January 1985, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York.

Throughout this solo exhibition, memorable images demonstrate Ginsberg’s ideas and unique vision; writing poems and taking pictures was complimentary throughout his life. The photographs have a poetic sensibility that reflected his writing. In the later photograph, Harry Smith, the American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, and experimental filmmaker, stands in his kitchen in his New York City apartment in 1984. The work captures the intensity and character of Smith so vividly. In City Lights Corner, 1955, Robert Dolan, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky, Robert LaVigne, and Lawrence Fernlanghetti, the poets and writers instrumental in defining the Beat Movement, stand in front of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

Allen Ginsberg published numerous collections of poetry, including Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956), Kaddish and Other Poems (City Lights, 1961), Planet News: Poems, 1961–1967 (City Lights, 1968), and The Fall of America: Poems of These States (City Lights, 1973), which won the National Book Award. In 1979, Ginsberg received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1993, he received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters) from the French minister of culture. In his later years, Ginsberg became a distinguished professor at Brooklyn College. Allen Ginsberg’s photographs were the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 2010 with an accompanying book entitled, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg.

All photographs are copyright of the Allen Ginsberg Estate.

For more information, please contact Thomas Solomon at thomas@thomassolomonartadvisory.com

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